Thoughts on systems and organizations

Current research on non-hierarchical companies

Together with my colleagues from Finland Futures Research Center, Aalto and Hanken, we have been busy in the past weeks putting together a research agenda and securing the participation of interested companies.

The theme is non-hierarchical companies – companies that have abandoned the belief in hierarchies and are instead exploring a way of running a company based on self-organizing, emergent direction setting, intrinsic motivation and emphasis on culture. At the heart there is a fundamentally different belief about the nature of humans. These companies believe humans are inherently good, trustworthy and wanting to do the right things. If you believe in that, then a lot of the policies, middle management coordination, processes, control mechanisms and other ingredients of bureaucracy that are evident everywhere actually become irrelevant.